The original band numbered only five or six hundred, but they had with them many assistants, Dalmatians banished by the Venetians or escaped from the galleys, and brigands of other nations, as well as indigenous camp-followers.
— from The Shores of the Adriatic The Austrian Side, The Küstenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia by F. Hamilton (Frederick Hamilton) Jackson

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees.
— from Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry by Albert Pike

Great efforts from great motives are the glory and blessedness of our nature.
— from The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 by Various

Oh, how I like blue, sunny skies, instead of gray and grim ones, and blazing colors instead of the dismal grays and browns of our nondescript winters!
— from The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither by Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird

This object I have endeavoured in these short essays to attain by various means; by tracing the maternal passion through many of its more subtle windings, as in the poems of the IDIOT BOY and the MAD MOTHER; by accompanying the last struggles of a human being at the approach of death, cleaving in solitude to life and society, as in the Poem of the FORSAKEN INDIAN; by shewing, as in the Stanzas entitled WE ARE SEVEN, the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion; or by displaying the strength of fraternal, or to speak more philosophically, of moral attachment when early associated with the great and beautiful objects of nature, as in THE BROTHERS; or, as in the Incident of SIMON LEE, by placing my Reader in the way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another and more salutary impression than we are accustomed to receive from them.
— from Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 1800, Volume 1 by William Wordsworth

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are [Pg 429] silent and slow.
— from Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again A Life Story by Joseph Barker

An eight-day clock ticked comfortably upon the wall, and on either side of it were two pictures, wood-cuts, eked out with rude splashes of red and blue by some primitive process of lithography: the one represented the "Take of a Right Whale in Behring's Sea by the Good Adventure Barque out of New Bedford;" the other, the "Landing of H. M. Troops in Boston, His Majesty's Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1766."
— from Pirate Gold by Frederic Jesup Stimson